Response Ranking with Deep Matching Networks and External Knowledge in Information-seeking Conversation Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deep learning framework that incorporates external knowledge to improve response ranking in information-seeking conversations, outperforming existing models and offering new insights for system design.

Contribution

It proposes a novel method combining deep neural matching networks with external knowledge, enhancing response selection in information-seeking dialogue systems.

Findings

Outperforms baseline and state-of-the-art models on multiple datasets

Effectively integrates external knowledge via pseudo-relevance feedback and knowledge distillation

Provides analysis on response types, model variations, and ranking examples

Abstract

Intelligent personal assistant systems with either text-based or voice-based conversational interfaces are becoming increasingly popular around the world. Retrieval-based conversation models have the advantages of returning fluent and informative responses. Most existing studies in this area are on open domain "chit-chat" conversations or task / transaction oriented conversations. More research is needed for information-seeking conversations. There is also a lack of modeling external knowledge beyond the dialog utterances among current conversational models. In this paper, we propose a learning framework on the top of deep neural matching networks that leverages external knowledge for response ranking in information-seeking conversation systems. We incorporate external knowledge into deep neural models with pseudo-relevance feedback and QA correspondence knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments with three information-seeking conversation data sets including both open benchmarks and commercial data show that, our methods outperform various baseline methods including several deep text matching models and the state-of-the-art method on response selection in multi-turn conversations. We also perform analysis over different response types, model variations and ranking examples. Our models and research findings provide new insights on how to utilize external knowledge with deep neural models for response selection and have implications for the design of the next generation of information-seeking conversation systems.